MoEF panel to assess causes of flood, suggest measures

With over a thousand people dead in Uttarakhand and property worth crores lost, the environment ministry will set up a panel to gauge whether bad planning had a role to play in the devastation and will also try suggesting measures to minimise human loss. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jun 24, 2013, 01:15:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With over a thousand people dead in Uttarakhand and property worth crores lost, the environment ministry will set up a panel to gauge whether bad planning had a role to play in the devastation and will also try suggesting measures to minimise human loss.

“All aspects from mining to construction of dams to encroachment of river-fronts will be examined by the high level panel,” a senior environment ministry functionary told Hindustan Times.

Also the panel will try to provide ways to implement environmental regulations with the possibility of declaring a no development zone in the upper reaches of Uttarakhand.

Till now, the state government led by chief minister Vijay Bahuguna had opposed imposition of any regulation in the upper reaches of Uttaranchal on grounds that it would hamper development for the locals.

Bahuguna had written a three-page letter to Manmohan Singh recently, seeking exemption of environment clearance to hydro projects generating up to two megawatts of power.

He told the PM that his government will not implement the eco-sensitive zone on the Bhagirathi river despite a Group of Ministers recommending it.

“There is rampant mining in river-beds, buildings have been allowed all across river fronts, there has been huge deforestation and above all hundreds of dams are coming up in the fragile hills,” a ministry official, who had traveled extensively in Uttarakhand and also worked there, said.

The panel will also review all mining leases issued by the state government and the environment ministry in recent years.

Ministry sources said sand and stone mining leases in all major rivers of Uttarakhand had been issued in recent years without any impact studies.

The ministry’s decision to constitute a panel will also mean putting the BK Chaturvedi Committee report in abeyance for the time being.

The committee earlier this year had recommended that most of the hydel projects should be allowed but with reduced capacity to generate power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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